INDIANAPOLIS — The Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site recently announced the recipients of the 2018 Advancing American Democracy Award. This year’s honor goes to three of the most influential and respected figures in public media today: Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonists, Michael Ramirez and Mike Luckovich, and Robert F. Kennedy Excellence in Journalism award winner, Gary Varvel.
The Advancing American Democracy Award is given annually by the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site to “an individual or individuals who, in an exemplary way, advances the values of American democracy by encouraging citizen participation in self-government and in greater civic society.” Past award recipients include Paula Kerger, Senator Richard Lugar, Representative Lee Hamilton, Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard, Judge Sarah Evans Barker and award-winning Hamilton biographer, Ron Chernow.
Michael Ramirez, is not only a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner in 1994 and 2008, but has won every major American journalism award including the 2005 National Journalism Award, 2018 National Headliners Award, the 2008 Fischetti Award, the H. L. Mencken Award, and is a five-time National Cartoonists Society editorial cartoon division winner. He has also authored two books, “Everyone Has the Right to My Opinion” and “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Obamacare.” Mike Luckovich, of the Atlanta Constitution, won both a Pulitzer Prize and the Reuben award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 2006. This was his second Pulitzer; his first was awarded in 1995. He had previously received the Reuben award for Editorial Cartooning in 2001, but this was his first time to be named the overall outstanding cartoonist by a group of his peers. Gary Varvel, an inductee to the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 2011, and the Reuben Award for Best Editorial Cartoonist in 2010. He is also a fifteen-time winner of the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists’ Award for the Best Editorial Cartoon, a thirteen-time winner of the first place award for Best Editorial Cartoonist in the Hoosier State Press Association Contest, as well as a board member of House of Grace Films and co-writer and producer of the films, “The Board” (2009) and “The War Within” (2014). Ramirez, Luckovich and Varvel will personally accept the Advancing American Democracy Award at the 13th Annual Mary Tucker Jasper Speaker Series, the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site’s largest annual fundraiser.